I complete this task every day. So do you, and so does every other speaker of English. What am I talking about? Here's a hint: Your English teacher, Strunk and White, the Microsoft Word grammar checker, and some guy on the internet would all tell you not to use it. What is it? The passive voice.

"Avoid the passive." You've probably heard this prescription a hundred times. But what does it actually mean and why should you follow it? I'll answer the second question first: you shouldn't. It's an unhelpful piece of pseudo-advice, of uncertain origin and even less certain value. Despite it's name (which is, after all, just a technical syntactic label, not a description of everyday usage), the passive voice does not produce weak or boring writing. In fact, the often touted distinction between passive and active is largely fabricated. "Active" is probably even more of a misnomer than "passive": not even close to all "active" sentences actually describe actions, and a passive can describe an action perfectly well. Famously eloquent writers and orators such as Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill used the passive frequently. Even the prescription's strongest proponents (style guide authors Strunk and White, for example) don't follow it themselves. In fact, many of them probably don't even know what it means. Thus we return to the first question...

To horribly oversimplify, this is what the prototypical English sentence looks like in most current theories of syntax:

When you use the passive voice, you leave out the subject, and the object takes its place. To quote linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky, "Simplifying a lot, the passive provides a way to treat what is normally the direct object of a verb (or, occasionally, the object of a preposition) as a subject." So now our sentence looks something like this:

The passive can thus be quite useful: when the subject is irrelevant or ill-defined, the passive allows you to omit it. Or it can allow you to reorder the elements of a sentence to fit better into the overall structure of a paragraph or discourse.

To sum this all up in a sentence: The passive is being slandered!


Don't let hackneyed prescriptions stop you. Do this task. Use the passive.

references:
Two ways to look at the passive
Passive aggression
How long have we been avoiding the passive, and why?
Strunk and White vs. the Declaration of Independence
When men were men, and verbs were passive
How to defend yourself from bad advice about writing
Arnold Zwicky